By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
Everyone familiar with American political history knows about the ‘White House Plumbers’, a covert special investigations unit established during the Presidency of Richard Nixon, and tasked with spying on his political opponents. The unit’s bungled attempt to burgle the Watergate offices of the Democratic National Committee, in 1972, eventually led to Nixon’s resignation. But the Watergate burglary was but one of many operations conducted by the ‘Plumbers’, who were one of several ‘dirty tricks’ units managed by the Nixon White House. Now, nearly 40 years after the Watergate scandal erupted, veteran intelligence correspondent Jeff Stein provides new information that suggests the Nixon White House may have bugged the Pentagon telephones of senior American military officials. Stein managed to track down Dave Mann, a former member of the Pentagon’s Counterintelligence Force, who in 1971 stumbled upon a classified report claiming that listening bug signals had been detected emanating from offices in the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The signals had been picked up by a technical surveillance countermeasures (TSCM) team during a routine sweep of the Pentagon, in search of unauthorized interception devices. Mann run some tests to verify the TCM team’s report, and discovered that the bug signals originated from the personal office telephone line of General William Westmoreland, who was then the US Army’s Chief of Staff. He also discovered that the telephone of his assistant had been compromised, as well as the telephone lines belonging to the US Army’s assistant secretary, its logistics director, and at least one general. Mann’s personal conclusion was that the phone lines were most likely bugged with the cooperation of the Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Company, which was at that the time considered an operational wing of the FBI, under Director J. Edgar Hoover. Read more of this post

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS| intelNews.org |
The government of the United States secretly helped France expand its nuclear arsenal, in order to promote its rivalry with Britain, according to newly declassified documents. The clandestine assistance to France, which tested its first nuclear bomb in Africa in 1960, began during the Richard Nixon administration, and was actively directed by Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s senior National Security Advisor. The documents, which were obtained by researchers at the George Washington University and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, include a 1973 memorandum authored by Kissinger, in which he writes: “We want to keep Europe from developing their unity as a bloc against us. If we keep the French hoping they can get ahead of the British, this would accomplish our objective”. Toward that goal, the US ought to provide the French with information that will make them “drool but doesn’t give [them] anything but something to study for a while”. By doing so, Washington would be able to force Britain to stop “behaving shitty” and conform to American foreign policy objectives: “if they know we have another option, they might buck up”, writes Kissinger. Read more of this post

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
The convicted former chief of Chile’s intelligence services during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet has accused the CIA of murdering the deposed leader of the Chilean army and former Vice-President of Chile, in 1974. General Carlos Prats González was a close political ally of Chilean President Salvador Allende, who was toppled by a CIA-assisted military coup in 1973, led by General Augusto Pinochet. General Prats managed to escape with his family to neighboring Argentina. It was there where, in 1974, he was killed along with his wife, Sofia Cuthbert, in a massive car bomb. A Chilean court has convicted General Manuel Contreras, who headed Pinochet’s feared DINA secret police, for the murder of General Prats and his wife. But Contreras, 81, who has been in prison since 1995, servicing over 100 years for several kidnappings and murders of anti-Pinochet dissidents, now accuses the CIA of the Prats murders. Read more of this post

US experts doubt North Korea sunk South Korean ship. A new study by US researchers raises questions about the investigation into the sinking of the Cheonan, a South Korean navy ship, which went down last March, killing 46 sailors. International investigators have blamed a North Korean torpedo, raising tensions on the Korean peninsula.

Nixon-Kissinger dialogue raises CIA assassination suspicions. A loaded dialogue between President Richard M. Nixon and his trusted national security adviser, Henry A. Kissinger, dating from 1971, appears to confirm that the CIA had a role in the 1970 assassination of Chilean army commander-in-chief Rene Schneider.

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
The CIA has produced an hour-long documentary about a failed 1952 covert mission inside China, which resulted in the death of two American pilots and the capture of two CIA paramilitary officers, who spent a total of 40 years in Chinese prisons. The documentary, which premiered last week on a restricted basis at the Agency’s Langley, Virginia, headquarters, is based on internal CIA accounts of the operation, some of which were released in 2006. The premiere was reportedly attended by John Downey and Richard Fecteau, two CIA paramilitary officers on their first mission, who were captured by Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) units inside Chinese territory, after the CIA-operated C-47 Skytrain airplane that was carrying them deep inside Chinese airspace was shot down in a Chinese ambush. Read more of this post

CIA investigator sentenced. CIA employee Kerry Gerdes, who falsified interview reports while performing background checks on CIA employees and potential employees, has been sentenced to two months in prison and six months of home confinement.

President Ford authorized warrantless wiretaps, memo shows. Even though he replaced Richard Nixon, who was forced to resign the US Presidency over intelligence abuses, Gerald Ford secretly authorized the use of warrantless domestic wiretaps soon after coming into office, according to a declassified document.

By J. FITSANAKIS and I. ALLEN | intelNews.org |
The arrests by US Marshals of four self-described conservative activists, who were caught trying to tamper with the telephone lines of Democratic Senator Mary Landrieu’ New Orleans office, have caused outcry in liberal and silence in conservative blogs. Most political allies of the four young men have been scrambling to denounce them, and the few who haven’t, have tried to play off the case as an ill-conceived political prank that got out of hand. Considering that America’s political culture still reels from the effects of Watergate (1972-1974), and the far more serious COINTELPRO (1956-1971), it would be criminal neglect on behalf of the FBI to treat the Landrieu incident as a “prank”. At the same time, however, Landrieu-gate is no Watergate. Neither the target nor the operational tactics and institutional affiliations of the four men involved in the case resemble anything remotely akin to either Watergate or COINTELPRO. Keep reading →

By JOSEPH FITSANAKIS | intelNews.org |
Four official documents from 1971, recently declassified by the US Department of State, show high-level collaboration between the US and Brazil in plans to overthrow the lawfully elected government of Chile. The documents include accounts of a frank discussion between US President Richard Nixon and Brazilian President Emilio Médici on ways to bring down the democratically elected Chilean leader Salvador Allende, as well as the government of Cuba, so as to “prevent new Allendes and Castros”, in Nixon’s words. The memorandum, which contains the official State Department account of the discussion between the two men, is dated December 9, 1971. Read more of this post

During his long career as US National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger kept many secrets. One of these was that he clandestinely recorded all telephone conversations he had with US government officials, which he subsequently had transcribed by his private secretary. Upon leaving office, in early 1977, Kissinger had the audio recordings destroyed but held on to the transcripts which he described as “private papers” not suitable for public release. George Washington University’s National Security Archive had a different view on the matter, however, and in 2004 managed to force the US government to hand over the transcripts. The Archive has now released a generous portion of 15,000 pages of transcripts, fully catalogued and indexed. William Burr, a senior analyst with the National Security Archive, who edited the released documents, described them as “ranking up there with the Nixon tapes as the most candid, revealing and valuable trove of records on the exercise of executive power in Washington”. Among other things, the transcripts reveal that Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger “shared a belief in 1972 that the [Vietnam] war could still be won”. [IA]